30.9.17

Beyond the daily drama and Twitter battles, Trump begins to alter American life

FILE
PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order cutting
regulations, accompanied by small business leaders at the Oval Office of
the White House in Washington U.S., January 30, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos
Barria/File Photo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Even without delivering on his biggest campaign
promises, President Donald Trump has begun to reshape American life in
ways big and small.

Over his first nine
months, Trump has used an aggressive series of regulatory rollbacks,
executive orders and changes in enforcement guidelines to rewrite the
rules for industries from energy to airlines, and on issues from campus
sexual assault to anti-discrimination protections for transgender
students.

While his administration has been
chaotic, and his decision-making impulsive and sometimes whimsical,
Trump has made changes that could have far-reaching and lingering
consequences for society and the economy. Some have grabbed headlines
but many, no less consequential, have gone largely unnoticed amid the
daily controversies and Twitter insults that have marked Trump's early
months in office.

Under
Trump, oil is flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline. Arrests of
immigrants living illegally in the United States are up. More federal
lands are open for coal mining.

The
administration has left its mark in smaller ways, as well. Trump has
rolled back or delayed Obama-era rules and regulations that protected
retirement savings from unscrupulous financial advisers, made it harder
for companies that violated labor laws to land federal contracts and
restricted what internet service providers could do with their
customers’ personal data.

Those kinds of
low-profile policy shifts are far from the dramatic change promised by
the headline-loving Trump, who won the White House with a vow to
fundamentally reshape Washington. But the effects can be just as real.

“Trump
is doing an awful lot to shape policy and blow up policy,” said Norm
Ornstein, a political analyst at the conservative American Enterprise
Institute.

Stymied by his failure to win
congressional approval for his big-ticket promises like a repeal of
President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform, known as
Obamacare, and a border wall with Mexico, Trump has turned to
administrative action.

He has rolled back
hundreds of rules and regulations, signed 47 executive orders and used a
previously obscure legislative tool, the Congressional Review Act, 14
times to undo regulations passed in the final months of Obama’s
presidency. The law had only been used once before, 16 years ago.

‘REGULATORY ROLLBACK’

The
Trump administration has withdrawn or delayed more than 800 Obama-era
regulatory actions in its first six months. Proposals for new rules,
including those to delay or rescind existing rules, dropped 32 percent
from the same period in 2016 under Obama, and are down from similar
six-month periods under presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and
Bill Clinton, a Democrat, according to the libertarian Competitive
Enterprise Institute.

At the same time, Trump
has limited new federal regulations by requiring agencies to cut two
rules for every new one they create. He has asked each agency to name a
regulatory reform officer to take aim at unneeded rules.

“By
far, this is the most significant regulatory rollback since Ronald
Reagan,” said Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute. “The Trump mode so far is to regulate bureaucrats
rather than the public.”

Many business leaders
have applauded the moves, aimed at fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise
to end policies he says are strangling the economy. But critics say his
reductions in environmental and worker protections put corporate profits
before public health and safety - in direct contradiction to the
populist campaign rhetoric that helped Trump win blue-collar votes.

“Where
Trump has had success in changing the rules of the road it has been
used against the very people who helped elect him,” said Ben Olinsky,
vice president for policy and strategy at the liberal Center for
American Progress.

Neomi Rao, who is helping
to lead Trump’s deregulatory drive as administrator of the White House
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said the reforms would
promote economic growth and job creation.

“Regulatory
reform benefits all Americans,” she said in a statement, adding that it
can have “particular benefits for low- and middle-income workers.”

The
“Trump effect” also goes far beyond policy. After a
precedent-shattering campaign, Trump has redefined presidential behavior
with his freewheeling and sometimes confrontational use of Twitter, his
refusal to step away from his businesses and his reliance on family
members as top advisers.

He has rattled
longtime foreign allies with his sometimes bellicose statements and
stoked social and political divisions at home, most recently with his
attacks on mostly black professional football players who kneel in
protest against racial injustice during the national anthem.

Slideshow (2 Images)

Many
of Trump’s biggest policy proposals, including a ban on transgender
people serving in the military, withdrawal from the Paris climate change
accord and an end to the Obama-era program protecting from deportation
young adults brought to the United States illegally as children, remain
in limbo or under review in an administration where policymaking is
often messy.

But Trump has found ways to make
headway on some other stalled initiatives. While a repeal of Obamacare
has faltered in Congress, his threats to cut the subsidy payments that
help cover expenses for low-income consumers have created enough
uncertainty that major insurers have pulled out of some state markets or
asked much higher monthly premiums for 2018.

TOUGH RHETORIC HAS IMPACT

The
administration has slashed advertising and cut grants to community
groups that help people sign up, raising fears that many people will
forgo coverage or forget to re-enroll in health plans for next year.

While
plans for a border wall are stalled in Congress, Trump’s tough rhetoric
had an apparent effect on illegal border crossings, with the number of
apprehensions on the southwest border falling 63 percent from 42,000 in
January to nearly 16,000 in April. Since then, they have begun creeping
up again, but are still below levels seen last year.

A
crackdown on immigrants living in the country illegally also led to a
sharp increase in arrests in the interior of the country. In Trump’s
first 100 days, the number of arrests by immigration agents increased by
nearly 40 percent over the same period a year earlier. The number of
immigrants without criminal histories arrested by immigration agents and
booked into detention has jumped by more than 200 percent from January
to July of this year, according to data reviewed by Reuters.

A
flood of lawsuits has been filed against the new Republican
administration, with Democratic state officials often leading the
charge. The lower federal courts, stocked with judges appointed by
Obama, have at least temporarily blocked several Trump initiatives.

Trump
has been forced to rewrite a travel ban the administration says is
aimed at protecting federal borders after the first two versions faced
legal challenges from critics who said it discriminated against Muslims.
The latest version imposes travel restrictions on eight countries.

One
of Trump’s most lasting accomplishments is likely to be the
confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch, who restored the U.S. Supreme
Court’s conservative majority and at age 50 is likely to serve for
decades.

“I think Trump actually has
accomplished a lot. There are a lot of things for conservatives to be
happy about,” said Tommy Binion, director of congressional and executive
relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “And I‘m optimistic
there will be more.”